I still edit myself in rooms that feel even slightly unsafe

Dear Delyara, Not dramatically. Not enough that anyone would call it self-erasure from the outside. Just little adjustments. Softer phrasing. Less direct feeling. More context. A quicker laugh. Less certainty. Enough to keep the room easy and me slightly absent from my own full size. I do it quickly. That’s the sad part. The room doesn’t even always deserve that level of caution. Sometimes it’s just familiar enough to activate an old script, and then I am no longer fully in the present. I am partly in old survival, dressed up as social skill. I wish I could trust my unedited self more quickly than I trust the room.